A New Generation Discovers the Bike

Youth Exhausts Thrill of Auto and Roller Skate and Goes in for the Old-Time Fun of Pedaling

An October 1925 New York Times Magazine article suggested that the bicycle might become one of the preeminent features of the era to future historians.

The article, with no byline, wrote:

Yet when in time the social historian sets out to write the history of a period beginning, say, in 1890 and extending beyond our own date, perhaps he will brush aside such accidents as world wars and their plagues and frenzy and select the bicycle as the pivot on which swung all this swift change of ways and manners.

That most certainly didn’t happen.

But perhaps more interesting to me was the article’s headline: “A New Generation Discovers the Bike.” The bike? I consider that shortened slang word to be primarily from the latter half of the 20th century – think 1978’s Queen song featuring the lyric “I want to ride my bike.” But back in 1925?

Sure enough, I was actually right. Google Books Ngram Viewer charts the frequency of words in books across time. As this graph shows, the word bike was barely used at all circa 1925, making that NYT Mag headline a rarity. The word only really started to gain traction in the 1970s or so, befitting that 1978 Freddie Mercury lyric.

Bike actually overtook bicycle in the year 2000 exactly, and has remained more popular ever since.

Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer

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A New Generation Discovers the Bike: Youth Exhausts Thrill of Auto and Roller Skate and Goes in for the Old-Time Fun of Pedaling

Published: Sunday, October 18, 1925

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